It was eerily quiet on the suburban streets of Iceland on October 24, 2023.
Schools weren’t open, swimming pools closed and several other banks shut early. Meanwhile all-male news teams announced shutdowns across the country with buses delayed, hospitals understaffed and hotel rooms uncleaned.
That was because the vast majority of Iceland’s women weren’t at work or at home taking care of children; as an alternative that they had gathered in downtown Reykjavík and other cities and towns across the country.
The 100,000-strong group, made up of ladies and non-binary people, were participating within the yearly protest called kvennafrí [Women’s Day Off in English], which calls for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence by refusing to work, cook and take care of children for a day.
By afternoon, an enormous group had gathered on Arnarhóll, a hill in Reykjavík city centre, to wave signs and sing feminist songs.
While different variations of ‘Women’s Day Off’ had been happening on the identical date yearly since 1975, what made 2023 all of the more poignant was the massive numbers of attendees – far larger than ever before – and among the many campaigners refusing to work were Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir and Iceland’s First Lady Eliza Reid.
What happened in Iceland in 1975?
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Women in Iceland could vote, get an education and run for public office by the Nineteen Seventies. But they were still hugely underrepresented within the Parliament, only making up 0-5% of politicians. Because of this, a movement called the ‘Red Stockings’ entered society in 1970.
Together with similar groups, the Red Stockings decided to organise ‘something amazing’ for the United Nations ‘Women’s 12 months’ in 1975. Women would down tools and stop working in a bid to get men to hearken to their concerns. They named the protest ‘Women’s Day Off’ as an alternative of ‘Women’s Strike’ to not risk women being fired by employers. Stickers were printed and appeared on clothing, handbags, partitions and windows, as 1000’s of ladies put Friday October 24, 1975 of their diary.
They included Kristín Ástgeirsdóttir, a 22-year-old history student on the University of Iceland. She’d been brought up in Vestmannaeyjar, a fishing community in Iceland, by her nurse mother and author father.
‘It was like a wave,’ Kristín tells Metro. ‘Women would ask one another “are you going?” at work or on the road. The word spread. On the day, around 2pm, we began streaming down the streets to this meeting. To see all those women, to feel the energy, it was improbable.’
Women gave speeches and sang songs because the day passed and, at one point, a brass band performed the theme tune to ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, a BBC series in regards to the Suffragette movement which had been popular in Iceland. It was estimated that 90% – 30,000 – of the nation’s women had taken part within the demonstration.
Meanwhile, men took children to work or remained home to look after them. Based on local reports, foods like Bjúga – a smoked sausage which doesn’t require cooking – ran out in lots of supermarkets.
Radio presenters called households in rural towns and villages to ask if women were participating within the protest and – for essentially the most part – had the phone answered by men who confirmed this was the case. Fish factories were forced to shut since so most of the employees were female and telephone switchboards were unmanned.
The Women’s Day Off was known as ‘long Friday’ by some fathers.
Did the protest change anything?
The 1975 march galvanised a generation of ladies in Iceland.
By 1983, that they had gained 15% of parliamentary seats in comparison with just 5% a decade before. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir got here to power in Iceland in 1980, becoming the world’s first democratically elected female president.
On the time, Kristin was a journalist at a radical left-wing newspaper. She recalls from this time: ‘Seeing and hearing the discussion around Finnbogadóttir – she was divorced, she had adopted a toddler, she had had cancer – made me so offended.
‘Some men thought it was unattainable for a lady like that to be in power. But she did win and that was improbable, it meant quite a bit for the following generation of ladies to see a girl on this top position.’
Finnbogadóttir was president until 1996 and further history was made in 2009 with the election of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir as Prime Minister of Iceland – and the world’s first openly gay PM.
Meanwhile, Women’s Day Off protests continued, albeit on a smaller scale.
In 2010 for instance, many ladies packed their bags and left work at 2:25pm to focus on the gender pay gap and the way the time they essentially stopped getting paid compared with men’s earnings. Similarly, in 2016, Icelandic women left work at 2.38pm, while in 2018, they went home at 2.55pm.
‘A convention of clout chasers’
Without today’s social media or rolling news, coverage of the 1975 march could have been confined to local newspapers. But resulting from one very fishy situation, that was not the case.
In 1975, Britain and Iceland were embroiled within the third ‘Cod War,’ a bitter feud over fishing rights. Journalists from Britain had been in Reykjavík for a crunch meeting on October 15 and several other decided to remain on and canopy the Women’s Day Off march.
‘Icemaidens give their men the freeze’ and ‘Chaos reigns as Iceland’s women go on strike’ were among the many headlines within the British press. On October 24, 1975, the Coventry Evening Telegraph reported ‘men, who initially treated the strike as a joke, began to take the purpose.’
Fast forward nearly 50 years and the story of the 2023 mass walk-out was covered by news outlets the world over, from the Guardian to CNN. The event had marked the primary full-day women’s strike in Iceland since 1975.
Nonetheless, a segment by WGN-TV, a news channel based in Chicago, Illinois, garnered a wave of negative responses on YouTube.
User @WillmobilePlus commented: ‘The most important convention of clout chasers on Earth’ while @johncross2516 added: ‘All the ladies at rally, Heaven has come ultimately, the lads can have some peace.’ @mrbloxpie4221 wrote: ‘You’re telling me these people refused to take CARE OF THEIR OWN CHILDREN JUST TO PROVE A POINT? That’s just horrible and the children deserve higher moms.’
A way of solidarity
On the day of the protests in 2023, gender studies researcher Dr. Finnborg Salome Steinþórsdóttir stood nervously outside the University of Iceland. She had posted in Facebook groups and sent out emails in regards to the event to her colleagues. Yet, the mum-of-one was paranoid no-one would heed her call.
Finnborg, 39, tells Metro: ‘I assumed “this may very well be embarrassing, what if no-one turns up and I’m there alone?.” But then increasingly more people began to arrive. We had 1,000 people alone from the university in the long run. I remember taking a photograph as we walked towards downtown Reykjavík – we took up your entire street! There was a way of solidarity within the air.’
The group desired to take aim not only at VAWG and the gender pay gap, but in addition tackle the broader undervaluation of ladies’s jobs; resembling the gender segregation between traditional ‘female’ jobs like care and education compare to ‘male’ jobs and expectations in finance and business.
Because the protestors marched around Tjörnin lake and made the streets of Reykjavík their very own; they walked within the footsteps of revolutionaries who took part in the primary monumental Women’s Day Off in 1975.
What’s next?
While feminists in Iceland have vowed to maintain fighting and the country has organised a series of discussions and events to mark 50 years for the reason that start of Women’s Day Off, the fact of the situation is stark.
Slightly than shrinking, the gender pay gap has widened, going from 8.6% in 2022 to 10.4% in 2024, while 4 in 10 Icelandic women have been sexually or physically assaulted.
Kristín has been a student, a journalist, a politician, an activist and a tutorial throughout her life. She is now 73 and a part of the group which has been organising 2025’s 12 months of motion. What keeps her fighting? What stops her from giving up?
The activist pauses and takes a sip of tea out a Moomin mug [creator Tove Jansson is a feminist icon to many in Nordic nations] before answering.
‘I used to be brought up with the idea that our role in society is to make it higher. It can be crucial we stay up. We see how easy it could actually be for men to take rights away; we now have seen that in Afghanistan, in Russia,’ she says.
‘We are able to’t surrender or forget the history of ladies and the history of feminism. If we learn from our history, we all know what we’re coping with in our future.’
To read more in regards to the Women’s Day Off movement, click here.
A version of this text was first published in October 2024.
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